Israel

Known also as ‘the Holy Land’, Israel is an exceptional country.
Fleeing slavery to conquer and settle in Canaan (broadly the same land as modern Israel), Jewish culture evolved around worship at their Temple in Jerusalem, built around 1000BC. Several attempts by foreign powers to eradicate Israel ended in failure, until in AD135, after some 70 years of war with Jewish rebels, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, expelled the Jews, and renamed Israel as ‘Palestine’.
The subsequent Jewish diaspora continues to the present day. Nineteenth-century pogroms in Eastern Europe sparked the Zionist movement that aimed to re-establish the Jewish nation in Palestine, which had become part of the Ottoman Empire. From 1882 onwards, waves of Jewish immigration began. In 1947 the League of Nations voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas, a plan accepted by the Zionists but rejected by the Arab League.